Unfortunately, over half of those 10 million do not pay a monthly fee. They do not buy boxes, neither classic nor expansion, either.
They do pay netease roughly 6 cents an hour to play wow, however. blizzard seems to get roughly 3 cents of this.
---------- Post added 2012-02-09 at 03:49 PM ----------
it is a reverse merger into the existing publicly traded structure of activition. osmeric is well aware of this.
The old activision mgmt team runs the company, most notably. Not the old vivendi games mgmt team.
Where do you come up with only 1.1 million? 300k+600k+800k = 1.7 mil, and "most of" the 800k subs was in China.... please get your facts straight.
---------- Post added 2012-02-09 at 03:55 PM ----------
Where did you even hear this? Does this have to do with players from other countries? I think I heard something about them paying in different ways, but I know here in the US every WoW player pays *at least* about $11 a month, ranging all the way up to $14.99..... save the tax. ;p
Activision-Blizzard is a division of Vivendi (Vivendi is a huge umbrella holdings corporation, much larger than Activision-Blizzard). If you want to make sense of this, Vivendi is GM, and Activision-Blizzard is Buick.
Vivendi is so huge, they can literally eliminate Activision-Blizzard and move on and just swallow the loss. Like Sony can do with PS3.
Last edited by Kevyne-Shandris; 2012-02-09 at 04:02 PM.
From the #1 Cata review on Amazon.com: "Blizzard's greatest misstep was blaming players instead of admitting their mistakes.
They've convinced half of the population that the other half are unskilled whiners, causing a permanent rift in the community."
New players are the majority by far now. I hardly know anyone anymore on my day 1 retail realm that I have played on for over 7 years.
I always find it hilarious when people quit and everyone says "CYA IN A MONTH!", probably because of the 20-30 people I played with extremely regularly for years, 2 of us are left. Everyone else has perma quit, including all my rl buddies who used to play wow.
It's too early to say SWTOR is dying. The meaninful numbers will come with EA's next quarterly report, where we find out how well they've managed to retain subscribers and gain new ones. The problem I see with SWTOR (and don't get me wrong, I'm enjoying it) is that it is absolutely primitive compared to WoW. Just small things like being able to resize the UI make a big difference or having simple macros can make a huge difference for someone's gameplay. Bioware needs to put a lot of polish on SWTOR and do it quick, otherwise, they could be in for a rude surprise when MoP is released. YMMV, of course.
If the numbers are going up, they're in good shape. If the numbers are going down, that's very bad news for them. If the numbers remain stagnant, it's probably not good either, but it depends on whether they're retaining subscribers or people are leaving, replaced with new ones.
Last edited by Lord Blackmore; 2012-02-09 at 04:17 PM.
Stating an opinion as fact does not make it fact. Opinions are not fact. So don't be stupid and make a fool of yourself by trying to pass off your opinion as fact.
Nope.
MMOs share the same player base pools. What you're seeing is players transferring too and from different servers.
Just like last night in trade, someone claiming they're new to the server looking for a guild @ 85 (bet folks were asking him, "Why did you transfer TO Shandris???").
From the #1 Cata review on Amazon.com: "Blizzard's greatest misstep was blaming players instead of admitting their mistakes.
They've convinced half of the population that the other half are unskilled whiners, causing a permanent rift in the community."
Stating an opinion as fact does not make it fact. Opinions are not fact. So don't be stupid and make a fool of yourself by trying to pass off your opinion as fact.
false, the decline was mainly in the west for the first 3 quarters as a whole. Just look at their revenues - losing 2 million china subs wouldn't put them back to bc-era revenues.
---------- Post added 2012-02-09 at 04:19 PM ----------
all stock ownership does is let them control the board of directors, to some degree, and there are legal issues limiting this as well.
the activision mgmt team, kotick et al, now run a-b, having reverse merged blizzard into activision.
---------- Post added 2012-02-09 at 04:20 PM ----------
more than half their subs are in china, and that is pretty much the deal there as I wrote - all you have to do to be counted as a sub is log in in the last 30 days....
except my numbers are from ea itself and yours are from your wildest fantasies
---------- Post added 2012-02-09 at 08:27 PM ----------
so basically they control the company. and they have also roughly half the members of the board of directors too.
The board doesn't run the company day to day, they elect officers who do that, though in effect here it appears kotick was accepted as ceo as part of the original deal, and is presumed untouchable in practical terms unless something really blows up.
Kotick is doing things the way he always has, which is what he was expected to do.